1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to multithreaded processors and, more particularly, to sharing hardware resources between a number of requestors.
2. Description of the Related Art
To continually improve computer system performance, computer processor designs have been improved in a number of ways. Microarchitectures have evolved from single execution unit machines to superscalar designs having multiple pipelines and multiple execution units. To accommodate changing processing environments such as server based applications, for example, a more recent processor design trend includes multithreaded processors capable of executing multiple threads concurrently.
One aspect of multithreading capability may involve providing multiple functional hardware resources for the various threads to use. For example, in a multithreaded processor, different threads may each execute floating point operations or load-store operations. Thus, there may potentially be several types of operations going on in parallel each requesting the functional hardware resources.